Nope. Not Batman. Or the Dark Knight. This is not a homo-erotic entreat to the wiry, muscular Christian Bale, or a slightly sloppy hug for big bad Ben [pre or post cocktail].

And though I feel that Keaton’s socio-psychopathic gift to the Burton Batmans was remarkable [is it me or do the Burton-Batmans sound like a rather smart family from Cape Cod?), and gorgeous George is always worth a mention, it is the small plasticky, modular superhero who has my heart.

Lego Batman is petulant, childish, misguided, isolated, narcissistic to the level of a clinical pathology BUT he’s still fundamentally a good and fun guy – and the ultimate role model, both literally [he’s modelled out of plastic pieces] ethically [he’s aways trying to shut down or thwart some toxic shocker or other] and symbolically [the Bat Sign is a beacon in the world that says bad awful things will always get their just and plastic desserts in the end].

Unlike the Dark Knight – he who broods in an enormous bat-winged cape on various V tall buildings – Lego Batman’s super-power resides in his all round, kinda clumsy unfunny dork-like coolness – or as a social strategist might say, his social reach. He is simply a lot more attractive and palatable to a far wider range of type and age-groups of people.

Lets face it, the highly cinematic and terribly troubled Bruce Wayne can get a little ‘BORING’ – but as soon as he is rendered in very shiny black plastic, has ‘Nope nope nope no no nope no Nope’ tantrums and crunches his way through microwaved Lobster claws, shell on, whats not to like?

Lego Batman’s love of industrial metal & grind core, and working with black, black, black and very dark grey, though broody and nihilistic in some ways, is really quite chirpy and redeeming.

And sure, he has a tendency to pop off with his Star Wars buddies just at the moment when he’s meant to be helping his Lego Movie buddy Emmet save everyone – and he struggles to maintain a text-book balanced and mutually beneficial relationship – but who wouldn’t; and doesn’t sometimes.

But my main love for characters like Lego Batman is rooted in their ability to be transcendent – to be able to be dark and light and left and right and rare and middle and base and grubby and funny and sad and inspiring; all at once.

It is an ability that the realm of Sustainability, Social Impact and those who’ve tasked themselves with rebalancing society could do with embracing far more.

The sustainability agenda needs all the transcendence it can get in the human department.

Though enormous steps forwards have been made [even getting it on the agenda of some corporations took decades of work and the relentless commitment of some very professionally brave people], there is still a deep division between the engineered integrity of the organisational, systemic and material change being undertaken at scale in large organisations and corporations and the insight and subtlety of the communicating voice and tone of the messaging that announces and celebrates these transformations for all the world to see.

It is the lightness of touch and the ability of characters like Lego Batman to appeal to all age groups in a very human and funny way that I find the most powerful. Especially in this space. The chiaroscuro of human nature, including the more childish and incorrect aspects of who we are as creatures needs to be front and centre to engage people.

But there seems to be a view amongst those trying to do something serious in the world that levity and playfulness diminishes or infantilises otherwise serious issues or points to be made. And that even when something childlike is to be used, it has to be ‘corrected’ in a trough of vanilla moralising and social engineering to make it finally palatable to a pungently consensual audience of rare intelligence.

The recent Thomas The Tank work around the Global Sustainability Goals, though wholly admirable, still ended up quite prim, was overly gender engineered, and in doing so ended up lackinghumanity for me.

Friction is a human truth – friction tension and raw energy are essential in characterisations – even in children’s characters. The Homogenisation and cultural symmetry being inflicted on a lot of characterisations in pursuit of correctness these days seems inhuman to me. Humanity is imbalanced in so many highly nuanced and inextricable ways that to remove all imbalance between good and bad seems a fruitless pursuit.

Roald Dahl was the master of exploring dissonant and highly complex narratives inside beautiful whimsical and ultimately charming storytelling. The unvarnished nature and grimness of some of his characters made the stories all the more compelling.

Is Lego Batman on a par with the conflicted beauty of BFG or the moral ambivalence of Willy Wonka, the staggering and mystical precocity of Matilde and the creature narcissism of the Fantastic Mr Fox? Probably not.

But I’d still like to put Lego Batman forwards as the new prince [or princess; croissant or cork wedge shoe, depending on what gender he is identifying with at any given time] of sustainable communications.

I would rather have the 17 UN Global Sustainability Goals unpacked by the schlocky, childish, self-obsessed and mostly black plastic Lego Batman to a soundtrack by Ensturzende Neubauten than be cudgelled quietly by the imperious correctness of the reengineered Thomas The Tank Engine.

The Sustainability Vigilante picking on poor unsuspecting people with utterly inappropriate levels of vigilantism, weaponry and violent attrition for even the smallest infringement of a Global Sustainability Goal objective could be VERY funny.

Commissioner Gordon’s wife bins three perfectly recyclable containers…dun dun dahhhhhhh…without rinsing them!!!……arrggghhhh …cue trip hammer drum riff and crunching guitars…the roof ripped off the apartment block, a salvo of bat rockets pummelling the front room, followed by bat-swooping beatings metered out to her and everyone else in the block for good measure.

Lego Batman stringing up the old man from the Soda Shop as a highly sexually-suspect chauvinist and patroniser of women [how can I help you this fine sunny morning little lady?] or battering three men to a pulp with Bat hammers because they were found to be using face Scrub with Micro-beads could make for highly entertaining mini episodes of a whole series of ‘GSG themed’ Lego Batman content. We’d still get the point. But we’d also manage it with a little bumpiness and some conflicted humanity.

Doing good things and being a force for good in the world is not predicated on being insufferably GOOD. Goodness needs a foil to be real to the majority of people. People can learn immeasurably good things from bad or flawed people. And good people can only find their edges when confronted by bad things and people. The friction is essential.Adopting a Pilgrim approach to communicating good things is not the answer. But we are still doing it.

Perhaps the pilgrim piety that is still shaping sustainability communications is the same malaise that is rendering out safe space thinking in universities so that children and young people grow up believing that it is also possible to get through life without ever having to listen to something we disagree with or find unpalatable – simply by forcibly exorcising it from our immediate society – and see that as a ‘good’ thing. Dunno. But, as history has shown us, both the ‘Crusader’ thing and seemingly benign regimes where control is increasingly applied to blot out dissenting voices, when done with little or no humour and a highly tuned sense of irony, tend to end badly most of the time.

So blah blah blah. We must learn to speak of sustainability in human terms without homogenising and cleansing it of all human flaw and friction.

If we are to cross the chasm and move to engaging a far, far broader church of people and inspiring them to happily act upon more sustainable lifestyles it has to feel less goody goody and less pious.

We need to ‘lighten up’ and be prepared to be messy – because being human is messy. And we’re humans first and foremost.

And in our increasingly hyper connected world, Purpose is nothing without tech.

Purposeful companies and businesses increasingly use tech, digital platforms and the social networks to shape, co create, disseminate, sense check and activate their every purposeful initiative amongst the crowd.

We are beginning to move beyond the cultish tech for tech’s sake ‘everything’s genius’ approach to all things digital. People are not blindly saying ‘yes’ before they even know what they’re being offered.

And it is not only in the masses’ response to the latest highly questionable i-phone up grade new grade what grade launch that we see a little of the emperor’s clothes being shredded. A number of financial analysts regard the herd of Unicorns that have appeared in the last 3 or 4 years as ‘fluffy stock’ with questionable valuations. Simply put they’ll trade and make cash out of them while they can but they think they’re a little puffed up in the value department.

Even the hard-core geeks and nerds – those applying the genius of AI and machine learning to their business, platforms and product ideas – are using them to unlock more humanity in the tech and in the customer experience, not just capacity and capability.

But being more human isn’t a purpose. I would say its an evolutionary imperative. Just because some tech or platform play is possible or probable doesn’t make it palatable. You can’t guarantee that everyone will just continue to have an appetite for everything because it’s cool or does more shit that the last one.

Moore’s Flaw is that, although the keep doubling it trajectory of hyper accelerated microprocessor capability might be a fact, generally, people are not linear and they are far from modal. People are suspicious of being hyper accelerated, and after the first rush tend to push back against it. This is something to do with their emotional sense of risk, control and threat and how they respond to it, beyond the rational Should I? Shouldn’t I?

In some ways the tech future scapers need to apply a mechanism somewhat similar to how John Maynard Keynes’ Animal Spirits was applied in the world of finance and economics – where he pointed to the lateral and randomly applied instincts, emotions and proclivities that ostensibly drive human behaviour in regards to the adoption of risk in financial situations. Understanding how people feel emotionally about the adoption of hyper accelerated tech and its dizzying ability, for example in the work place, would make for a far richer and more realistic tech and digital landscape.

But I digress.

If Tech is turning the world, beyond the increasing humanities of its evolution, is their a purpose it might embrace beyond its direct impacts in society? One rooted in its community?

Is there a massive unspoken cause that it could rally around – one which is rooted in its own culture and expertise – and ultimately that delivered a mutuality of interest for every stakeholder – employees, customers, suppliers and partners?

In rifling through various pieces on tech and society over the past few months, Scott Wilkinson, head of Brand at Virgin Media Business and myself came to a thought.

The answer might lie in its heartland and population – and by that we mean the teeming populous engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, developers, coders and designers et al who keep this massive multi Trillion dollar industry turning.

There is much spoken of the ‘on the spectrum’ nature and culture of the super tech geek world – or any geek world for that matter.

But we have noticed that most of the ‘noise’ is around an almost cultish celebrity status given to people with ‘astonishing’ minds.

High Functioning Autistics – the celebrated ones – have become a sort of ‘new rock n roll’ – the super brains – and in the tech industry these human super processors are the Natural Intelligence that shapes Artificial Intelligence and astonishing paradigm shifts in the world.

The fact that in broader popular culture the likes of Courtney Love, Darryl Hannah, Stanley Kubrick and many other HFAs make no secret of their condition is redeeming and very helpful to remove the stigma that still surrounds the condition.

But having an above average IQ, the intellectual skills and the successes that they do still sets these HFAs a long long way away from the average person with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

People who exist lower down the ASD spectrum with less immediately identifiable symptoms will find life far more difficult as their behaviours can be misunderstood.

So the question is this – beyond the rock n roll of HFAs, how many ASDs exist in the Tech Sector? And if that number is highly over indexed versus society (researchers estimate that 1% of the population have some form of ASD*), and if the sector is proven to host a disproportionate number of ASDs and equally profit from them and their condition, then perhaps therein lies a Purpose for the Tech Sector rooted in a pure truth and within both its interest and expertise to act upon it.

Tech Guru Rajesh Anandan, founder of software company ULTRA testing only employs people on the spectrum, and for what he sees as very very good reason, the benefits of their engagement far outstripping the immediate issues of their behavioural difficulties. The idea of Aspies being celebrated and valued in tech circles is far from new.

My interest lies in those millions who still live in the shadows – those who have not truly identified their condition and struggle with its impacts – those who have not stumbled into tech as some Wardrobe to a Narnian world where they feel more at home and alive.

Is there an Action Group to be created drawn from the heads of the Global Tech Players – to set an agenda for helping those with every level of ASD in regards to education, training, employment and community – what better use to put a world leading ‘tech campus’ of smart, energetic, highly connected people to than taking care of their own?

Does a purpose rooted in unleashing opportunity for all those people who otherwise struggle with ASD in its lesser forms fit with the global tech culture?

No idea. Simply a thought. Something that revealed itself to us.

This kind of initiative may already exist. It certainly deserves greater exploration.

Perhaps the sector might think ‘not interested’ – or ‘we already do enough’. It is always hard to get people involved because it requires investment. And Purpose rarely unlocks investment. But profit and finance does. Securing growth does.

Perhaps they will only do it if someone puts a value on ASD as one of the engines of the Tech sector’s astonishing rise and success. A value that they feel compelled to protect.

Perhaps that what’s we need to do. If we were to be able to measure the impact and value of ASD in the tech sector and present it as a highly particular economy – what I tentatively call The Aspergers Economy for want of a better label – that would change the lens on people’s perception and appetite for investment. By rooting the value of the sector within the gift of a certain group, perhaps the value of their contribution as a highly productive constituency driving a global economy worth in the trillions of dollars; perhaps people might the be prepared to invest in the resilience of that global economy by improving the opportunities of the primary actors in its success.

That might be a Purpose worth pursuing because, ultimately Tech is Nothing without Purpose, and that Purpose has to be more than another AI story or ‘look at my slidey new interface’ youtube film.